Fabrics with fine pile provide the look and touch feel of furs or pelts, hence are appealing to consumers. Conventional circular knitting machines that can knit fine plush fabrics, like U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,146,829 and 7,127,920, include a cylinder with a plurality of latch-less needles located thereon, a needle dial contained a plurality of latch needles and a plurality of sinkers. The sinkers are located on a sinker holder circulating the cylinder. Each sinker has a cutter at the front end. The sinker is driven by a cam on the sinker holder to slide toward the cylinder, and the cutter on the sinker severs a pile loop formed by a yarn to form a pile. References of other types of circular knitting machines that can knit fine pile fabrics also can be found in PRC patents Nos. CN201136946 and CN201546011, Germany patent No. DE19518490, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,592,212 and 6,094,944. However, the conventional circular knitting machines that can produce fine pile fabrics require to add a sinker holder around the cylinder, hence significantly increase the total size of the circular knitting machines and the number of components required. As a result, the circular knitting machines are complex in structure, and fabrication and assembly also are more difficult.
Aside from severing the pile loops via the sinkers, the circular knitting machine can also be equipped with blade-contained needles to cut the pile loops. For instance, R.O.C. patents Nos. 205255 and 208294 disclose a pile cutting apparatus. It has multiple sets of vertical cutter needles, horizontal knitting needles and horizontal sinkers located on a cylinder of a knitting machine. These three sets of elements can be moved in collaborated displacements so that the knitting needles can pick up yarns to form loops in cutter needle slots, then the sinkers move forwards to press the surface of the loops and the cutter needles are moved upwards to the apex, and the blades at the lower end of the slots sever the pile loops. However, in order to push the cutter needle to the apex its travel path has to increase, that means that the time to cut each pile loop is longer, that adversely affects the knitting efficiency of the fine pile fabrics.